Hated, so what?

“People always have opinions in response to other people but ordinarily these are not of great moment—not until they crystallise into receptivity toward violence. It is a mark of excessive sensitivity to care so much about what people think of you - unless the cost of animosity is potentially lethal. And here it ought to be faced that American, British, and the broader European civilisation are and have been at risk not from the Chinese, the Russians, the Mexicans, or the Spaniards—either from their people or from their governments. It is certainly grotesque, as a matter of moral perspicacity, that Mexican journalists and a minority of Russians expressed themselves hatefully about American (and not only American, but that's another matter) suffering on September 11, 2001, or felt cavalier about it, thinking - as Escalante-Conzalbo and Tenorio-Trillo write about many Mexican intellectuals in the immediate aftermath to the massacres - 'that their first duty was to find a rational justification for such irrational violence.' (So did Noam Chomsky, the world's favorite American expert.) It is certainly chastening as well.

But it is not dangerous. It is annoying to tourists, and sometimes funny, to be hated as proxies. (I remember a weirdly irate Dutch tourist mouthing off in a Cretan restaurant back in 1984, 'What are you doing such a very long way from home?') It is a bigger deal when an Empire whose policies are sometimes preferable to the alternatives surrenders its moral authority. What is a bigger deal still is when people organise in such hatred of strangers that they are willing to slaughter anyone within range of a bomb or a missile; or finance them; or shelter them from the police. Insofar as this very big deal is at issue, how much control does the United States have over 'what they think of us,' anyway? No negligible amount. There are matters of policy and there are also matters of institutional stupidity.” Todd Gitlin.